Cognitive Psychology: The Stroop Effect

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Cognitive psychology is based on how mental processes such as perception, attention, language, memory and thinking occurs in the brain .Attention refers to the way we actively process specific information in our environment. When referring to selective attention one of the most widely looked at and replicated studies is the stroop effect , which was carried out by and also named after John Ridley Stroop(1935). The stroop effect by definition is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. In his experiment, Stroop administered two different sheets to the seventy participants.On the first sheet, names of colors appeared in black ink. While on the second sheet, names of colors appeared in a different ink than the color named. …show more content…

One of the main theories that has come out of the research regarding the stroop effect is the speed of processing theory. According to this theory, people can read words much faster than they can name colors. Because there is said to be a lag in the brain's ability to recognize color. To help support this theory a study known as the advanced stroop effect was carried out by Torin Franz and Evan Frick.Torin Franz and Evan Frick sought out to find if there is a point where the spelling of the word in a Stroop task is so jumbled that it does not interfere with our ability to report the color of the word. After conducting their experiment they found that the more jumbled the words the quicker the reaction times were in naming the color .This is because the words were so jumbled we were no longer automatically reading them. With this research psychologist were able to gain a better understanding of why the participant’s in stroops first experiment were able to recognize the words as fast as they did even when they were a different color, because the words were being automatically …show more content…

Ridley Stroop in 1935 which is why it was named after him. What Stroop observed was that it takes longer to name the color of the ink when the word is different from the ink than when the ink and word are the same.Stroop carried out multiple experiments, recording the time taken and errors made in each one.In each expierment stroop tested different things based on the same effect his experiments variaed all the way from words to shapes.How ever the dependent variable always stayed the same which was the response time of the participants. Stroop found that participants were slower to perform a task and made more errors when they were presented with an interference.Because the conflicting ink would affect the way the brain processed the information which goes into explaining current day topics such as automatic processing and is currently being used to treat/test children to see if they have a type of

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